Speaking of the Leopard intro movie, I just spent a few minutes watching the intro movies from all the major releases of OS X. It's fun to see just how much better each version gets. Check them out:
I'm pretty sure 10.6 Domestic Shorthair's intro movie will be downloaded directly into your brain. I heard that's a new feature they're working on. That and a tabbed Finder.
Leopard installed on my new iMac in about twenty minutes. Granted, this was a fresh install and I skipped the DVD verification as well as opted out of installing all but the Gutenprint drivers and English languages, but that's still pretty fast. So fast that I missed the new Leopard intro movie. I walked out of the room expecting the installation to take an hour and came back shortly after to find the setup panels waiting for me.
I had seen the leaked movie on YouTube a while back, but that's not exactly high quality. And since Leopard is the first version of 10.5 to be released in a fully HD age, I was looking forward to seeing the new movie. Luckily, ArsTechnica uploaded it as part John Siracusa's excellent and exhausting review, so I could finally watch it in high resolution.
It's gorgeous. If this was your first Mac, and your first experience with an Apple computer was the intro movie, you'd be in heaven. Hell, it's my 7th Mac and I fell in love all over again. These little touches are part of what continues to separate Apple from the rest of the pack. Contrast this excellent movie with the Windows Vista boot "orb" to get a better idea of what I mean.
Macworld has a new feature story called Picking Our Favorite Leopard Features, wherein various staff rate their favorite new stuff in 10.5. Among the selection are the commonly-touted features like iChat screen sharing, Cover Flow in Finder, Spaces and Time Machine, but Rob Griffiths chose something no one else mentioned, and a feature I'm particularly thrilled with: AutoFS.
There hasn't been a lot said about AutoFS, but I consider it to be one of my most-requested features for OS X: Putting network mounting on separate threads. Griffiths defends his decision to include it in his list (at number two no less) and describes it thusly:
Why give up such a high draft pick for this seemingly obscure technology related to networked volumes? Because AutoFS in OS X 10.5 is, quite simply, a revolution. AutoFS is responsible for the mounting and dismounting of network shares, and in Leopard, it will uses separate “threads” for these tasks. What does that mean in English? It means the end of the spinning rainbow of doom you see when you, for instance, click on a network share in the Finder, only to remember that you put the shared computer to sleep earlier.
One of the most irritating issues with OS X is the Finder's inability to deal with network-mounted disks gracefully. I need an abacus to count how many times in the last week alone the Finder has hung for two minutes because my Airdisk became unavailable or Katia's iMac was sleeping when I tried to access it.
Since switching to the Mac in 2002, this has been one of my biggest (and most common) complaints with OS X and I'm absolutely thrilled it has finally been solved. While it's nice to have lots of shiny new GUI features in 10.5, I can't help but be even more excited by the simple core functionality updates like AutoFS.
A while back I wrote about my problem with dual display to single display window placement, and I received a bunch of emails from people having the same problem. Thankfully, I also received an email from Abhay Kumar1 with a solution: A freeware, Universal preference pane called Forget-Me-Not.
Forget-Me-Not will remember your window positions for you! Forget-Me-Not will save your window sizes! Forget-Me-Not will restore everything for you when you re-connect your monitor!
And, by golly, it actually works. The only things that don't seem to get moved back correctly are the Twitterific window and the Quicksilver panel, but everything else gets moved about perfectly.
Now I can unplug my Cinema Display and all the windows shift to single-display layout. Plug the display back in and bam—they're back where I want them. Fantastic!
The other day, I finally got a chance to install Boot Camp and Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook Pro. I'll talk about Windows Vista in detail in a later posting, but I wanted to post a quick tip for anyone who might be having issues with Boot Camp partitioning. When I tried to partition my drive, Boot Camp told me:
The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved.
Then, as if it was a valid work-around, Boot Camp told me to back up my files, wipe the drive, repartition, reinstall Mac OS X, and copy my files back, then try Boot Camp again. Yeah, that's not happening. It took me several searches and some crawling on the Apple Discussion forums before I found the answer to my problem. It turns out, Boot Camp can't partition your drive if you have any files larger than 4GB. In my case, it was an old Parallels virtual hard drive file from an Ubuntu install. That file was 4.2GB. As soon as I deleted it, Boot Camp partitioning worked just fine.
So if you run into trouble using Boot Camp, look for large files and either delete them or move them to an external drive in the mean time. Then you'll be able to partition and install Windows.
Every email I received in response to my complaints yesterday (about my display-swapping issues) was along the lines of, "Hope you figure it out, I have this problem too, let me know." I guess that means other people are struggling as well. I've yet to receive a solution that works the way I'd hoped.
On a somewhat related note, I forgot to mention a long time ago that many people emailed to point me in the direction of iPhoto Library Manager to deal with my local/networked library management. I've still yet to try it out, but I've heard lots of good things. Thanks to everyone who sent that my way.
I've been having this problem lately and hopefully one of you can help: I have my MacBook Pro hooked up to my Cinema Display for most of the day when I work. I use the CD as the primary display and the MBP becomes the secondary. Occasionally, however, I want to leave my little office and venture into the living room or—gasp!—outside.
The issue is that when I unplug the CD, the MBP display goes back to being the primary... which is fine, except that the MBP's screen has a smaller resolution, so all the windows hang off the screen. I have to spend a few minutes just dragging windows back into normal places, resizing things to fit again, et cetera.
Especially annoying are things like the iChat buddy list, which I keep in the upper-right corner of the secondary display... it moves to the middle of the primary, Twitterific (which I also keep in a corner) and other panels also get completely displaced.
Is there any utility that can solve this problem? Ideally, the app would just move everything in from the outer edge by the amount of pixel difference between the two displays. If my buddy list was 50px from the edges of the secondary, it should be in the same place on the primary after the unplug.
If anyone knows how to get around this problem, I'm all ears (or eyes, in this case): garrett at maniacalrage dot net.
I know a lot of people who have switched to the Mac in the last few years and while most them are already very knowledgeable OS X users, I occasionally get usage questions that make me realize there are a few small tips that everyone should know and that a lot of people don't. I've compiled a few here in hopes they might come in handy.
This is an extremely useful keyboard shortcut. By default, on a US keyboard, it's command-backtick (`) and it will cycle through all the windows of the current application. Think of it as command-tab for the current app. You use tab to go between all apps and backtick to go between all windows of the current app.
I'm always surprised by how few people know about this shortcut. And, like all other default OS X shortcuts, you can change this in the keyboard pane of System Preferences.
When you're writing a document in TextEdit or browsing a few levels deep in Finder and you quickly want to find out where you are, you can command-click on the window's title to get a menu showing your current location and a hierarchy back to root. This doesn't work in all applications, but most of the time if you expect it to, it does.
And, of course, clicking on any item in that menu will open that directory in Finder.
In addition, many people don't know about the path combo button available in Finder window toolbars. To add it, customize the toolbar and drag the Path button over. Clicking that will show you your current location back to the root from any window.
This probably doesn't come up for most people, but if you're in a large network or you do your own hosting or you change DNS more than a few times, you've definitely needed to flush the DNS cache on your Mac once or twice. Easiest way:
lookupd -flushcache
Depending on your rights, you might need to run this with sudo.
If you're like me, you try new applications and preference panes all the time, which means occasionally you need to do a bit of house cleaning and remove older things you don't use. For applications, I use AppZapper, but for preference panes even easier. Simply open System Preferences and right- or control-click on an icon in the "Other" section and you'll be given an option to remove the pane. Done and done.
Occasionally, you might want to select 15 files and find out their collective filesize. I've actually witnessed people select files, get info, and quickly add the values from each of the 15 panels that pop up. Madness! Here's a much quicker way:
Select your files and use option-command-i (⌥⌘i) instead of just command-i. This will open a single panel with combined details. You can also get this from the contextual menu by right- or control-clicking on a group of files and then holding down the option key. "Get Info" will change to "Show Inspector" and you can click that for the same effect.
With all the talk and speculation and rumors about OS X Leopard being close to release quality, and with "spring 2007" coming closer and closer, I'm beginning to get a little worried that the new version of OS X won't have a new visual look.
Many months ago, when Jobs mentioned that there were super secret things in 10.5 that they didn't want to announce yet, I was really hoping one of them was a refined user interface. I kept holding onto that dream until some time last week when I realized that there just isn't time.
For Apple to have a new user interface they still haven't shown testers seems insane to me. It doesn't leave nearly enough lead time before release, even if "spring 2007" means June.
Obviously, I hope I'm wrong. But it's beginning to sink in that I might not be.